Tuesday News: Almost half of Avon Romance sales are digital; Publishing’s piratical beginnings; Uses for Evernote’s new OCR engine
Publishing Newsdigital publishing / piracy6 Comments
Create a Searchable Catalog of Your Bookshelf by Snapping a Picture into Evernote – Evernote is evolving into one of the best Apps available. Not only is it full featured but it is free. Two unique uses include Evernote’s built in OCR capabilities that it launched with a new budget scanning service 1DollarScan (which has recently come under attack by Authors Guild). LIfehacker suggests snapping a photo of your bookshelf and Evernote will create a searchable inventory automatically.
Another great tool is one that Evernote is developing with Moleskin. From Nate, the Digital Reader’s blog, are details about a new Moleskin notebook that is designed to allow you to take handwritten notes that will be OCRed by Evernote. The reason why the Moleskin notebook is superior is because “The new notebook improves on the existing feature. The pages of the notebook are covered in a pattern of dots which are design so that the app can use them to correct for the distortion introduced by the camera. This enables you to add a page of notes as a rectangular note and not as a photo.”
And, there are even more cool features. Add a moleskin included sticker and it will be associated with a predefined tag. The notebooks aren’t cheap at $30 each.Lifehacker and the Digital Reader
Click for larger image
Henry Altemus Co – Peter Rabbit First Edition – When I was researching the serial piece, I came across Industrial Revolution: People and Perspectives By Jennifer L. Goloboy, Peter C. Mancall. According to an excerpt of the book, the success of early American publishing was due to rampant piracy of British novels. One example of such piracy was the first American printing of Peter Rabbit. It’s kind of crazy to think that the foremost publishers of our time in the U.S. were founded on piracy. Henry Altemus
Wildly Popular Chinese SF Trilogy to Get English Translation – The first Chinese full length science fiction work is being translated for “overseas audiences” which I presume includes English speaking audiences.
“The Chinese People’s Daily Online reported that Yao Haijun, the deputy director of Science Fiction World (SFW), the world’s biggest selling science fiction periodical, has signed a contract that will make award-winning author Liu Cixin’s “Three Body” trilogy the first full-length sci-fi work to be translated for an overseas audience, calling it “a great leap for the Chinese sci-fi industry.””Publishing Perspectives
Victoria Barnsley: ‘We can’t think of ourselves as book publishers any more’ – HarperCollins is determined to stay viable in the new digital consumption world. With 20% of its income in the UK from digital sales and nearly half in the US, HarperCollins is looking at data to engage in dynamic pricing to meet the market. “Nearly half of sales at HarperCollins’s Avon imprint, which specialises in the genre, are now in e-book format.”
Victoria Barnsley’s biggest new signing is not a Booker prizewinner, but a Spanish data analyst: she refers to Eloy Sasot, recruited from American Express, as her “secret weapon”. His team monitors sales around the clock, making the discounts or mark-ups needed to stay ahead of the competition. The Observer
The Moleskine notebook sounds like the Livescribe notebooks I use. Also pricey but not nearly as handsome though. If you have a good enough printer you can print Livescribe paper sheets– color laser is suggested but I did manage to do it with a high dpi inkjet. I bought a Livescribe Echo pen early in the summer and it is the best gadget I have bought in years. Has already saved a certain amount of fuss about what was said in meetings with the record feature.
I use Evernote a lot, but in the more basic, sync notes between my phone/laptop/pc kind of way. It is a great app.
Now I’m going to have to track down that Maria Monk book about the corrupt convent.
I am going to raise my eyebrow at the notebook with evernote thing. ICR (intelligent character regonition aka handwriting) is extremely hard to accurately grab. OCRing is easier because you can teach a computer a font. ICRing is harder because I may write my f like I am doing a math equation and so it looks kind of like an s but you may only ever use a cursive f that is sometimes not an f but a b…. if you get what I mean. It would have to be tunable to the user (which is software that does exist. I work with it, hence the geek moment.)
I will definitely be following though if only to be able to take pictures of all the random slips of paper I write on (eventually) and have it searchable.
@Alyson H:
I found a free digital version of it at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8095
Here’s the Wikipedia article about the author:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Monk
Looks very interesting!
Just thought I’d add that I found an interesting essay at a UPenn professor’s page refuting the Maria Monk story. Looks like it’s been quite a controversial book. I’m going to save a copy of it to store in Calibre with the book for when I get around to reading it. :)
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/hughes.html
I also meant to say that I’m very excited about the new OCR feature in Evernote. I have a few hardback books that I’ve purchased many times over, and the author seems to have no intent to digitize them. I might have to turn one of my extra copies into a digital version for my own use via the dollarscan service!